The Biden administration on Thursday restored some Endangered Species Act protections that had been scaled back under former President Donald Trump, giving the federal government more leeway to designate plants or animals as threatened or endangered.
The law, signed by President Richard Nixon in 1973, is credited with helping to save the bald eagle, the California condor and numerous other animals and plants from the brink of extinction.
In 2019, the Trump administration ordered changes to the law to ease costs for taxpayers and businesses. The changes considered the economic costs to industries, such as mining and logging, of decisions to designate species as threatened or at risk.
The decommissioning will mean that “decisions regarding the listing and designations of critical habitat will be based on the best available science,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in a statement Thursday.
The Trump administration’s decision was criticized by environmental groups for putting money before science.
Then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross argued at the time that the revisions fit perfectly with Trump’s mandate to ease the regulatory burden on the American public without sacrificing protections and recovery goals.
Source: Terra
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